Paleo Thunder

“Wait, you’re fuckin’ WHAT?!?!”

As an endurance athlete, “Going Paleo” is the equivalent to announcing that your weekend hobby is killing puppies with a butter knife. An enduronerds relationship with carbs is a like a Arkansas marriage: Filled with religious conviction, and with all the instant gratification of fucking your cousin. It usually starts (the carbs, not the cousin-fucking) in highschool when our coach/priests told us to worship the CarbGod with metric shit tons of pasta the night before a race. The next day our adolescent zealot bodies galloped down the course, swearing our new personal record was all because of the nine-bajillion calories of Italian food we’d shoveled down the night before.

But now I’m 32, with a bum knee and a temporarily limited training schedule. How the hell am I supposed to not get crushed in race season? Sell my soul to the prehistoric gods, and eat some goddamn nuts, that’s how. Because that’s what “The Cavemen did.”

First, it’ll drop your weight. Now, this is a tricky subject, because some stupid fuck is going to read that and think “Damn, if I could just lose ALL MY WEIGHT, I would be SOOO fast.” Don’t be an idiot. You have a nice middle ground where your weight is all functional. And that weight is probably something less than you are now, but more than you weighed in high school.

Second, if you cut out the carbs, you get your calories from fat. “But Pale Thunder, I’ve been taught by the gospel of CarbGod that I should avoid fat by eating fat free yogurt and diet coke?!?!?!” Great, enjoy your cancer, idiot. Fat is great for you, it’s what you use to fuel 90% of your exercise. The beauty of fat, is that you’ll get leaner on a high fat diet, because your body doesn’t feel like it’s starving all the time, AND if you eat mostly fat, your body gets better at burning it, which means extra VO2 points immediately.

Now, can you ignore the CarbGod and hope to race well? Of course not. He’ll smite your ass with some good old fashioned suck and lethargy. But in the off season, or during an injury, carbs are a little unnecessary. By avoiding processed food and sugar/starch, mostly you just figure out that you have to EAT REAL food. Which is, like, totally good for you. So eat your fucking bacon wrapped avocado and work on those abs. It’s what your prehistoric ancestors would have wanted.